a spreading of wings, a bating of breath, a sense of something coming

Sunlit park with dashes of rainfall

Lazy days watching birds and tapping rhythms with the ocean waves lapping and slapping against rocks on the shore.

Funny how we humans think we need to rush around, always having something to “do”. Funny how we think sitting and being, doing what everything else does — just existing is lazy.

Not exactly funny, I’d say. It gets a little unnerving.
How we’ve domesticated everything, including ourselves. How we shackle and cage, and rain pain down on things that don’t obey. Subvert dominant violence in subtle phrases like–

No-one would get hurt, if they’d just do as we say.
Don’t fight and don’t get punished.
Stay in line or pay the price.

Always someone behind those words willing to hurt you for stepping one centimeter out of line, out of place, out of control. Always some tool to prod you on quicker, quicker, more productive now. Fill the gap and move it, fast. Get it done now. Go until you rot. Don’t stop.

While birds float lifetimes on wing and water. While trees spend centuries growing a few feet taller. While everything lives and dies and lives and dies and lives and dies, on and endlessly on through what we percieve as a river of time.

If it has a current, why can’t we be happy just to bathe in it?

Because we want more and more and more. And we want it faster and easier and better and more pleasing and more fulfilling and give us everything right now without waiting.

I slip further from those lines and slowly untie those knots from around my wrists and ankles that have for years, years, years been rubbed raw. Now if only I could get this chain noose off my neck, I’d be free.

Free?

No, but I’d be capable — at least — of returning.
For now, I’m scratching like the rest of us at the surface begging to find release.